My students have written lots and lots of blog reviews – more than fifty, actually – and Bjarte’s review caused considerable joy and amusement as the reviewee and his readers ran the review through auto-translators to figure out what it was about.
I'm Jill Walker Rettberg, author and professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. I co-direct the Center for Digital Narrative, a 10-year Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence, and I lead the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life. This site started as my blog in October 2000.
J. Nathan Matias
Another reason why (unlike Mark Bernstein’s opinion in a post dated April 8 –http://www.markbernstein.org/) blog comments are a Good Idea(tm).
i1277
The “I reject comments” stance sounds kinda snobbish when it comes from people who have thousands of people reading their blogs already doesn’t it? “Darling, shouldn’t we get a gate to keep those blasted commoners from trespassing?”
Anyway, surely an article can be an interesting read without it being “commentable”, but for the “street-level”-blogs, comments are indispensable. They add life and magic and dialogue and what have you.
Henning
If you want to be part of the blog community you should allow people to comment on your blog.
Not allowing commentís turns your site into something else than a blog. It’s not something wrong with that, it might even be where we are all going, but donít call it a blog. It is after all one of the things that have made the blogging so popular.
Jill
Well, actually Henning, in this genre analysis of blogs, only 43% of the surveyed blogs had comments enabled at all, and you know, blogs were called blogs long before comments were a common feature of the genre.
I like comments and mostly prefer that the blogs I read allow comments, but I don’t think comments or no comments defines a blog’s bloggishness.
Out of curiousity: do you think that a blog that allows comments but where noone ever comments would count as a blog?
Henning
The way blogs has developed, during its relatively short history, has made it tricky to come up with a precise definition. We have moved from plain websites containing only links with a short description and allowing no contact with the author, to blogs with multimedia rich environments allowing interaction with the author. And soon, when digital video cameras are standard on mobile phones, I presume we will have a huge amount of live streaming video blogs. So, that brings us back to the basics: What is a blog? Iím not going to come up with a precise definition(Iím not that brave), but I do know this for sure; if blogs continue to change in the speed they have done so far, I doubt it that a definition made today will be valid tomorrow.
What I do know, is that one of the things that makes blogs so popular is the social aspect. Itís more to a blog than just publishing, something which is also is reflected in the various definitions that have been made. Trying to explain what blogging is all about without mentioning the interactivity and social life among bloggers wonít get much cred, at least not among bloggers. From my point of view this is after all one of the reasons why blogging has gained so much popularity. For me, today, a blog should allow comments. Other wise itís something else. Before you know it, it might look like a web-based newspaper. In the usage of blogs today, commenting has a natural place.
Take away the comment option and youíre left with a static (with regards to communication) html page with css features. This brings out another question: what if I put up a web site, without any blog software, update it regularly with small posts with the newest on top and link to blogsites, is it then a blog? Or what if I have a blogsoftware but the only ting I do is to post. This is surly starting to look like quibbling, but itís none the less interesting.
Commenting one anotherís blogs is part of the glue that makes blogs stick, it makes blogging social, fun and interactive. Trackbackís and bloggrolls are also part of this glue, but itís through commenting you get in ìdirectî contact with the author (like med now, I could have written an e-mail but I blog)
As for the last question; Iím tempted to put that in the ìnet diary genreî. A blog without any comments isnít much of a blog. Now one might say ìbut what if it has a trackback and a lot of links, isnít that interactive enough?î MaybeÖ.
A more widespread use of trackbacks might be the way to go to keep the blogsphere breading (then we would we also get rid of all that annoying spam).
Itís of cause understandable that popular blogs take away the comment option; it would have been a full dayís job to keep up with discussion and reply on all the various comments. I find it nice though to meet people through the comment fields in others blogs. It is a bit contra dictionary to shut out the people that have built up their fame in the blogsphere.
Anyway, when Iím arguing that a blog should contain comment fields I do this out of a snapshot of what is typical for a blog today. When blogs change so rapidly, it is important to discuss it in a historical contexts but with a focus on what is going on today.
As for all the big popular bloggers out there who have disabled the comment function, I wonder if your readers are going to stick?
According to the blog study mentioned in the last comment, 43% of the blogs didnít allow comments. That might not bee so striking when 63% used Blogger, and ìcommentsî is not a default option in this software. The other blogging softwareís I donít know about (except MT)
Cheers
Happyzone
Nokia Lifeblog
Another aspect of the discussion at jill/txt”>Jillís blog concerning web definitions and comments Nokia Lifeblog is a PC and…